Elizabeth Karpinski
Lead Data Scientist, Model-based Analytics
Elizabeth Karpinski is a lead data scientist with expertise in mathematical representations of complex systems and probabilistic analysis. Karpinski leads micromobility research projects at MITRE, with a focus on the safety and infrastructure requirements needed to support multimodal transport. She holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering and a master’s in operations analytics and management, both from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
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My name is Elizabeth Karpinski, and I'm a Lead Data Scientist studying micromobility in Bedford, Massachusetts.
Micromobility is about transportation that's much smaller than a conventional car.
This is vehicles like an e-scooter, a Segway, or an electric bicycle, but that's very small and only designed to carry one person.
Micromobility is so important because it could bring a lot of potential benefits to the transportation world.
Imagine if you had a different kind of car available that cost 95% less than your current one.
That kind of price difference was very hard to turn down, especially as we look at ways to make our transportation system more energy-efficient and more environmentally-friendly.
The major risk that we are concerned about is safety, and because many of these vehicles are two-wheeled for maximum efficiency and lightweight design, they're very easy to unbalance and suffer collisions even without a secondary object.
MITRE's mission is to solve problems for a safer world, but first, sometimes to do that, you need to know what the problems are that are making people unsafe.
For example, when it comes to an e-scooter, it might not be immediately clear where the sources of the danger come from.
By studying incidents and understanding how accidents occur and where the worst injuries come from, we can start to pinpoint where the most important areas for innovation are.
What I find really rewarding about data science is the puzzle solving.
You're confronting a huge amount of information, but none of it is necessarily the information that you need.
One thing that I really like about MITRE is just how collegial everyone is.
Everyone has their own projects that they're excited about and they're always trading stories and interesting bits of work.
It's great to be here as an early career STEM professional because there's so many people to learn from.
At MITRE, project work isn't a zero sum gain.
Your project today might be my project tomorrow.
I also really feel like MITRE is the place where nobody winds up by accident.
Everybody has at some point chosen a path that took them to MITRE and that's chosen them to do this work in the public good.
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